My trysts with Mahendra Singh Dhoni
4 years, 7 months ago

My trysts with Mahendra Singh Dhoni

The Hindu  

November 4, 2005, Aurangabad: A day earlier, I had first witnessed the charisma of Mahendra Singh Dhoni at the Nehru Stadium in Pune – sealing the One-Day International series for India against Sri Lanka with successive sixes off Russel Arnold. September 18, 2007, Durban: Minutes after he was anointed as Rahul Dravid’s successor to lead India’s ODI team, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, while reluctantly agreeing to speak to the Indian mediapersons’ entourage in Durban during the inaugural World Twenty20, placed a rider: “Only four questions and no one-on-ones except for him. After addressing a choc-a-bloc media gathering in the stuffy press conference room in the basement, as Dhoni started taking the stairs with a journalist from East India speaking into his ear, the witty captain turned back and screamed: “ Yeh dekho, gyaarah pooch raha hai!” Two days later, I saw Dhoni tell his wife Sakshi to ignore the shutterbugs as he along with the rest of his teammates attended a reception hosted by the governor of Maharashtra. Every time he maintained a blank face with the media manager responding with “Next question, please.” This was probably the moment in Dhoni’s captaincy that changed his relationship with the media. Before addressing the gathering in the afternoon, soon after passing the baton to Virat Kohli as the India captain across formats, Dhoni asked a Board of Control for Cricket in India executive, “I hope you have informed everyone in Bombay in advance so that they can make it today.” With the pressure of captaincy off his shoulders, the jovial and expressive Dhoni of the olden days – albeit with hair much greyer than when he took over the captaincy – was back.

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